


In the House of Wires

by Tlon



Series: The Razes [2]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Anal Sex, Angst, Corporate Espionage, Cyberpunk, Dark Solarpunk, F/M, Gang Rape, Hell Capitalism, Hurt/Comfort, Interrogation, Lima Syndrome, M/M, Oral Sex, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Science Fiction, Sleep Deprivation, Stockholm Syndrome, Torture, and even when it does it's pretty much useless, but with more angst if that is possible, not a sequel to pale machines, think mona lisa overdrive crossed with brazil, torture doesn't work
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-17
Updated: 2016-10-15
Packaged: 2018-08-11 03:44:45
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 16
Words: 18,994
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7874911
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tlon/pseuds/Tlon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Coming east from the corporate state of California, Daniel thinks Eco will be like all the other firms he's hit: a doddering and easy mark for his judicious redistribution of medical discoveries, from the careless rich to the deserving poor. But he and his partner have underestimated just how mad a place can go. Soon, he's trapped with a woman who is both frightening and pitiable, bent on extracting his secrets for reasons she doesn't even seem to understand. And of everyone at Eco, she may be the only ally he can get.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Free Market in Action

**Author's Note:**

> Like I said in the tags, this is basically unrelated to and thematically different from _The Pale Machines_ , though they're both set in the same world.
> 
> In this chapter, beautiful outlaws Daniel and Kamara begin to reconsider whether kleptocratic chaos is really preferable to efficient sociopathy.

_The East is soft. That's what Daniel tells himself when they catch him at a restricted terminal in Eco Medical: companies in the West might cut like glass, but the Eastern Seaboard is soft._

_This will be over in no time._

*

Kamara isn't sure if Daniel does what he does because he feels like he has something to prove, or something to atone for. He's a doctor just like she is, but unlike her, he's a real one, because his parents put him through a top-flight Alphanum apprenticeship. They wanted him to be a researcher – and Kamara gets the sense that he would be, in an ideal world – or a comfortable corporate practitioner, serving executives down in New Frisco. But instead he'd gone to the northern patent wars theater without even being drafted, ended up stapling limbs and dressing chemical burns alongside her in the dust fields of Idaho, elbows-deep in rot and helplessness. And now he's crushed beside her in a third-class car of a second-tier solar train, pretending to whisper romantic overtures in her ear.

“It'll be fine. Nobody's expecting corporate espionage for a hard antibiotic. Rich people don't get staph,” he's actually saying, with the nervous energy his voice always gathers before a run. Which doesn't mean Kamara doesn't find it romantic, too – it's the kind of voice that would usually make her want to bluff her way into one of the empty first-class cabins and tear his clothes off just for one last go before they split up. But this time, she might actually be more nervous than he is.

“Are you sure?” she whispers back. “There's something weird about...” She hesitates at the name, as if it might bring a curse down on them. “About, you know.”

She's the one who scoped out Eco, once he found a reference to a new patent in one of his journals. It's one of those ancient firms that have flourished back east since the Razes, like woolly mammoths spared the graceful cuts of natural selection. Kamara and Daniel have been raiding places like it for months now, filtering their rewards through anonymous fences to trustworthy apothecaries and stamping-houses. They make clear that the formulas are illegal, so no society doctor or patient would be caught buying them – anyone who produces them will have to rely on the poor, driving prices down until they create something the slums can afford. It is, Daniel likes to say, the free market in action.

But Eco... there's something _unheimlich_ about the place. Its divisions never seem to speak to each other; new trademarks are announced one day and abandoned the next. The bulk of its money comes from a few perpetual licenses, under the direction of a president who seems to have no history. Eco is a puzzle assembled in the wrong order, with pieces doused in gasoline, resting next to a burning match.

“Not any weirder than the rest of the Seaboard,” Daniel says, his breath tickling her ear. Kamara twists around, kisses him, and grins.

“Well, babe, if you're sure... go burn it to the ground.”

The train whispers to a halt. Daniel gathers his bag and his forged references, just another bespectacled blue-eyed country doctor looking for a laboratory position in the big – by this godforsaken region's standards – city. Kamara has arranged a cryptographic dial-out once a day until he manages to get the formula and meet her again, just enough to keep them in touch while he's living in Eco's dorms. For now, she stays on the train another stop, until the edge of the city stumbles down from the central skyscrapers like a flight of broken stairs. The train stops high above ground, and the stairs down from it _are_ broken, so nobody will want to come up from the slums. Kamara slides down the cement rubble with one hand on the rail, ignoring the uneasy clench in the pit of her stomach. Daniel will be fine, she tells herself. Daniel always is.

*

The guard knows something's wrong when the radio's text tells her to skip her nightly rounds guarding Eco's twelfth-floor colonnade and come down to the labs. She'll take any excuse to get out of the heavy summer air, but the labs at night creep her out, with their sickly ammonia smell and the chittering of rats and monkeys passing time in conversation before they die. At least none of the scientists will be there to talk down to her, like she's not smart enough to know what they're doing – sure, she doesn't know, but that's beside the point.

Someone's there, though, hunched over the round amber screen of a terminal. From across the room, she sees the white jacket of a tech and wonders what could be so important that he's here this late. She keys in a description, and the radio tells her. Things are about to get very bad indeed, for someone who is not her.

She confirms its concerns quickly. The man has a data slab beside him, copying something through one of the terminal's sockets. His movements are small and furtive, though he doesn't seem to have heard her yet, closing the feet between them. He puts his ear to the data slab and reaches to disconnect it, and the guard thinks she sees a smile on his face. He's probably from Morgan-Anodyne or Sayline, thinking he'll make it out with their hard-won research – or research that she assumes, at least, is hard-won. Eco wouldn't be paying the scientists if it weren't.

He seems to sense her when she's a couple of feet away, but by then it's too late. She throws her weight against him, jerking him to the floor before he has time to dodge. She twists one arm sharply behind his back, knee hard against his spine.

“Hey--”

She grabs the other wrist and cuffs him, pulling until he hisses in pain. He's tall but almost boyish, eyes pale and wide under her light.

She hits a button on her radio to call for backup. He seems like the kind of person who'll try to run, like he thinks she's not good enough to keep him held. She drives her knee hard into his back for the imagined slight, enjoying the noise of protest it produces.

“This is ridiculous,” the man wheezes. “I'm just--”

She slams him against the ground, hearing his glasses clack against the floor. “We know exactly what you're doing,” she says, drawing out the words, “And what you are. Dr. Daniel Aubrey.”

She half expected the radio to be wrong, and all she knows is what it tells her. But he goes quiet and a little limp when she says it, and she laughs.

Her partner sidles up behind them, and together they drag the man to his feet.

“What's security say?” he mutters. “What are we supposed to do?”

She glances at the radio screen. “Take him downstairs,” she says.

“Downstairs where?”

“Not downstairs. _Down_ -downstairs.” Involuntarily, she lowers her voice a little, letting it go hoarse. “To Confessore.”


	2. A Revenant

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Daniel finds secrets under Eco's floors, and an articulate skeleton in its cellar.

A jitter has started in Daniel's chest, the kind he usually calms with pills. His name should be safely locked away, and they're not supposed to be smart enough to get at it. Companies out here are pitted and crumbling like a limestone facade. No matter, maybe he'll be able to play innocent for a while, and lean on some corrupt employee before anything too bad can happen.

“Come on,” says the female guard, the one who found him. Daniel hesitates, unsure which way they want him to go. She shoves him hard, sending him stumbling to the floor without his hands to steady him. A hard kick to the side doubles him over, gasping. He hears a short, nasty laugh. If they're enjoying this, there's nothing he can do to save himself from more abuse. He lowers his head silently and tries not to give them any reaction that would either anger or encourage them.

They get a couple more kicks in on him before one pulls him up by the collar and pushes him toward a long, dark hall. The elevator at the end is one he's never seen before – neither a freight lift nor one of the woven gold boxes that line the lobby. It is cold, dull steel, perhaps old enough to have seen the Razes. _Where does it go?_ He wonders briefly. _It goes Downstairs,_ he answers himself, giving the word all the menace it deserves.

And it goes slowly. It shuts like a coffin with a reluctant mourner beside it, finally creeping downward. The male guard swears his frustration and slams Daniel into the elevator wall, as if in punishment for the wait. Even so, he has no doubt that the elevator is better than whatever and whoever is waiting for him.

Daniel knows, thanks to Kamara's reconnaissance, that Eco has a lower level. He also knows that this is not it. It's narrow and boxy, with the look of a large place that's been slowly chopped into pieces – like one of the grand old high-rise apartments back home. But there are no panel windows here, no view over the sleek trolleys on Market. This is a prison, he knows, even before they open a steel door and shove him inside. The only light comes from the hallways; it's enough for him to make out a metal shelf of a bed before one of his handcuffs is removed and threaded through a gap on its side, and his shoes are stripped off.

“Do we have to wake her up?” one guard whispers to the other.

“Why would we? She never sleeps anyway. Let's just leave before she shows.”

And then the door slams and the last slivers of light go, and Daniel is left alone.

_She_ must be Confessore, the name they mentioned. He resists the urge to count dark minutes under his breath until she comes – if she comes at all. Whatever it looks like, there can't really be a woman who lives down here all alone. There can't – 

“You are Daniel Aubrey?”

A blue-white bulb blazes above him, and through his squint, he looks up at the visitor. She has a planar face, too smooth for emotions to take hold on its surface. Her voice is Southern in accent and arctic in timbre: _Dayniel Ahbrey_ , he is to her.

“Yes,” he says quietly. “Are you Confessore?”

“You'd heard of me?”

“No.” He watches the face for any sign of disappointment, but sees nothing. “One of them said your name.”

She only nods.

“Then... who are you?” he asks.

“If you want to know who someone is, the last person you should ask is them.” The eyes are the only part of her face that look really alive, dark and glossy like an animal's. “But since you did... a revenant, you could say.”

“And then what's--”

Confessore's laugh grates in her throat. “If you asked someone else, you might hear that I – unlike you – ask questions well.”

Daniel's eyes wander down to her hands. They are bloodless, even paler than the rest of her, and the fingers curl slowly as if around a narrow neck. His heart hammers, but he tries to sound nonchalant. “What kind of questions?”

“Hard questions,” she says quietly. “Daniel, we don't need to be clever, you and I. I know you're a spy, and you – you know why they brought you down here, to me. I need to know who you sell to, who you're working for. Who else you've hit, though we know some of that already. If you cooperate right away, we'll be through.”

“What happens if I don't?”

“Then I leave you here to think on it for a few hours, until what I'm told is sunrise, these days. And then I make you give up everything they want to know.”

He shouldn't be afraid. He's been nearly caught once or twice, roughed up by Thelios upstate a month ago. And Kamara will be looking for him soon, when he fails to wire in. She knows the coast better than he does, will divine the existence of this inexplicable compound in Eco's belly.

Confessore looks at him for a few more seconds, as if waiting for a response. Then she sets her lips, turns her back, and turns out the light. As soon as the door closes, Daniel tugs the handcuffs against their bar. If he's not going to be sleeping tonight, he might at least try to do something useful.


	3. Cows, Under the Skin

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Confessore understands that being a productive worker means making the repulsive merely routine.

Fiona Confessore stopped setting her clocks against any real standard years ago. The cloisters, as she once named them in a bitter joke, are their own vespertine colony, too remote to operate on anyone's schedule but her own. Except when Eco sends down subjects, and reminds Confessore why she's here.

Even when she's alone, she forces herself to put on clothes every morning, because it gives the days form. Now she shrugs into her dull brown trousers and jacket, a newsboy style that she had Eco send away for from a fashion catalog. The thick fabric is a rare soft thing in the cloisters, and the color hides blood well.

She slides her everyday tools into the deep pockets, the galvanic pistol and the trench knife that she's had since she first left home. They're rarely necessary, but Confessore has a suspicion that Daniel Aubrey might change that today, before the fear sets in for him one way or another.

The room is silent as she opens the door and turns on the light. He's asleep, against all odds, folded into the cell bed with his glasses still on. Confessore stops for a moment to read his face, tan and wholesome with just the start of creases around his eyelids. As she sees fewer and fewer faces, it's more and more difficult to match an age to them, but his retains a kind of optimism that suggests eternal youth.

She reaches a hand to his shoulder, intending to wake him. It's only when he opens his eyes that she realizes her mistake. He grabs her arm and sends her rolling into the side of the bed, springing out and tumbling past her. The door slams, and Confessore catches her breath. A part of her – the old part, the one from outside the cloisters – has started to hum with adrenalin. The rest sinks with guilty regret at what comes next.

Daniel is at the elevator door as she steps into the hallway, looking for a button that's not there. He puts up his fists as he sees her, meeting her eyes with fury. Confessore looks down, pulls the pistol, and shoots. He freezes and topples, the galvanic leads caught fast in his shirt. She lets the current run for a few seconds, until she's certain his reflexes will be in rebellion against his mind, and approaches.

“Even I can't open it,” she says, retracting the leads and hunching over him. “If you somehow killed me, if no guards came, the very best you could hope for would be to exhaust my food and starve down here – if they didn't asphyxiate you first.” He's managed to pop the clasp of one of the guards' cheap cuffs, at the cost of a little skin and blood. She fits it around his lacerated wrist again and closes it, ignoring his protest. “Do you think you would cannibalize me first? I'm told the human liver is nearly indistinguishable from the bovine one.” It's something one of the strikebreakers said to her once, come back from a tour in the badlands, although he'd put it in pithier terms: _Goddamnit, your average person's just a cow under the skin._

He mouths something at her – a curse, probably – but his lungs don't have the strength to get it out.

“Well, at least now I know what you're capable of. You won't do it again.” She looks at him, as he lays prone. “I'm sorry.”

Confessore lifts her heavy boot with a precision she learned crushing palmetto bugs and brings it down on one of his ankles. He draws the leg in with a groan, trying to drag himself away from her. She crouches and takes hold of his left hand, the one he must have so carefully worked through the cuff. He screams when she twists a finger back, and she dislocates two more before he slumps back, half-conscious. She forces them back into place after, and it's not permanently crippling. But it will stop him from running or fighting – not for her sake, but for his. He has to understand that there's no getting out, except through Eco.

“I won't overestimate myself and try to carry you,” she murmurs, standing. “The guards will take you back to your room. Then we can begin.”


	4. Debutante Season

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There are gods and there are parasites, and it takes a meticulous knowledge of fashion to know which is which. Daniel is an immovable object. Confessore is an irresistable force. Corporations are people, maybe. And minor company executives are just sociopaths.

The guards drag him back and hold him against the wall, pull his clothes off, leering at his bare chest. One of them backhands him, and he feels the wire of his glasses slip from his face, then a crunch from somewhere around his feet. Everything is slightly fuzzy when he opens his eyes, but it doesn't matter, he supposes – his arms are stretched to his sides and bound to the wall now, ankles shackled loosely. It's primitive, something out of the documentaries about patent war survivors that he used to show potential clinic benefactors. He stopped when he realized that the arcology folk, who prided themselves on their smart cosmopolitanism, only found the experiences exotic.

Here in Eco's hidden underground, one of the men draws close and grabs Daniel's hair, baring his neck. He bites at it, groping lower with his other hand. This doesn't make it into the documentaries, but Daniel knows that it happens too. He wonders if it's lust or just a way to assert power, to further terrorize a man who's completely at their mercy.

“Come on.” Confessore is only a dim outline, but the guard steps away from him immediately. “Leave us alone.”

His body still feels full of jagged wires, but the shock is wearing off, leaving only exhaustion. With effort, he raises his head to her, preparing to guard against her questions.

Someone at Eco must have gotten hold of the Thelios job, because Confessore reads its rough details back to him. But either she or they don't seem to understand what he's doing. She asks, over and over, for the rival that's paying him, if he's playing companies off each other. At least, he hopes, this means they won't ask him for any of the people who are really involved in his game.

After a while he can't hold himself up with his arms, and his injured ankle is useless, leaving him to support himself with one leg. She just stands there, quiet and motionless, outline haloed through his naked eyes. Until finally, she leans close to him.

“I keep wondering... what are galas like in California?”

“What?” He wonders if he's heard her right, or if he's beginning to fade into delusion.

“That's where you're from, isn't it?” He starts to slip, and she jabs him, doubling him over against the wall. “I like to play the tapes of the ones here. Everyone is so elegant.”

Daniel wants to ignore her, but the question at least gives his mind something to focus on. “There's no society season in California. Not like here. No debutantes.”

“How do people know you have money there, then?”

“You -” If it's some subtle trick, he can't guess its purpose. “You have projects. Startup divisions. Causes.”

“Like you?”

Damn, he thinks, what does she actually know about him? “I never had money. My family did. They'd be... very disappointed.” They had hoped he might pass the medical bar with Alphanum, not waste his life for parasites – _parasite_ being the only word he's heard on both coasts with equal frequency.

“Did you ever tell them about your line of work?”

“They... god damn it, I don't have to tell you anything.”

Confessore slaps him, throwing him off balance and driving knifing agony through his arms as he tries to right himself. “I was just being polite. Eco doesn't care who your family is. She just wants names.”

“She?” Eco – _ayco_ , as Confessore's drawl renders it to Daniel's western ears – is a conglomerate, not a family name. Although at some point, there's little difference between a dynasty of blood and one of boardrooms.

Confessore ignores him. “One of our vice presidents heard about it too. He wanted to meet you. He should be down soon.”

“Why?”

She shakes her head. “Did you never see a gala, then?” she mutters. “I liked the year when they all wore the solar weave motifs. It was like watching... gods.”

His mind drifts as she describes her favorite dress from the tape, but it keeps focusing on the vice president. Maybe it's someone he can reason with, Daniel thinks. Or lie to. Or...

“There he is,” says Confessore. She opens the door, and Daniel's heart sinks.

The man is a fair-haired and smooth-faced dandy, molded into a caricature of Confessore's high society gods: the holographic three-piece suit with a pocket terminal chain, the pomaded hair with its neat part like the spine of a book. His smile is that of a hungry small-time predator.

“You can leave us, Fiona,” he says peremptorily, looking Daniel up and down. “I think I'll be safe.”

Confessore hesitates, and Daniel thinks he sees something almost like concern. She closes the door gently behind her.

The vice president closes the distance between him and Daniel and spends another minute standing there, taking him in. Daniel struggles to stay on his feet.

“So what were you after?” the man muses, putting a soft, hot hand on Daniel's neck. “S'pose that's what Fiona here is supposed to be finding out.”

It isn't, Daniel thinks vaguely – they know what he was copying. But he has little attention to focus on that, because the man is unsettlingly close, bespoke thermoplastic squeaking as he slips his grasp along the muscles of Daniel's arm. He flinches as fingers encircle one raw wrist, and it takes everything he's got not to fall again. Which is moot, because the man releases the cuff and he swings to hang from his other arm, biting back a cry.

“How long has she had you up here? I read about these, you know. Stress positions. I read about them. I bet more than she did.”

He releases Daniel's other arm and yanks him forward, sending him tumbling to his knees. He can't move, he realizes, can't even support himself with his broken hand.

The man grabs a handful of his hair and yanks his head back. “I'd have gotten it out of you by now,” he says. “And I've have had a lot more fun doing it.”

Daniel collapses with a kick to his side, moaning as he's pulled up again. “I could have you begging by now.”

He won't, Daniel swears to himself as the man cups his chin and lifts it toward him. He won't beg, no matter what happens.

“You can bet I'd have found something better to do with your mouth, too, if you wouldn't talk.”

He won't beg. He won't beg even though he can see the man rubbing himself through his slacks, and when he closes his eyes the man digs fingers into one sore shoulder and makes him scream. He won't show his fear as the man slides a finger over Daniel's lips and begins to open his pants.

“Sir.”

Confessore's voice, quiet as it is, cuts through the room. The man turns, doing his fly up again hurriedly. “What is it?”

“Eco wants me to start again. She's impatient.”

The man drops Daniel's head, and he slides to the floor, body flooding with relief. “Crazy bitch.”

“You shouldn't say that,” Confessore says, her tone gaining some of its old authority. “She's not wrong.”

“Fine.” He aims a final kick at Daniel as he stalks out.

Confessore waits until the door is closed to put an arm around Daniel and ease him up. Daniel wonders how long he's been here, whether it's night again on the surface. Whether Kamara has started looking yet.

“So your name's Fiona? Fiona Confessore?” He wonders if knowing this will create a ghost of a bond between them, at least, make it harder for her to do whatever she's about to.

“Yes.” Confessore doesn't even bother to look now that she's got him against the wall again. “And his name is Ethan Redder. Now we're even.”

“I --” he wonders again how they found him. “What gave me away? When they caught me?”

“No questions,” she says. “Not until you're ready to answer Eco's.”

They wait.

Confessore stops talking to him altogether, leaving him to his own thoughts as his muscles start to give out. She leaves. She returns with a black clipboard terminal two inches thick, probably older than his career in medicine. He catalogs the minutiae of her every movement with its stylus, because it's the only distraction he has from the pain.

She leaves.

She leaves the light on.

She stays gone.

He stays awake.


	5. Where the Ghouls Are

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Daniel receives a simple threat in the most needlessly complicated rhetorical gambit ever made, and Confessore gets what she needs, if not what she wants.

Confessore rouses herself every hour to wake and question him. The more times she reads Eco's report, the more she thinks Eco is wrong, on basic premises. No one is paying Daniel Aubrey – no one who matters, anyway. By her fourth or fifth session, he still hasn't told her anything of note, but she can see the tremor in his limbs as he speaks.

“How can you do this?” he croaks, quietly enough that Confessore has to lean close to hear. “How can you do it for a place like this?”

She gives a stock response to the banality, the same one she's been spitting glibly for years. “Practice.”

“They don't lose anything.”

Confessore pauses. “Who doesn't?”

“The companies, they don't lose anything. It's not... espionage.” He slurs the word, and she wonders if he even realizes he's giving himself up. “It's just for knockoffs, for people these big – these big firms would rather let die. Is that...” he starts to slip and rights himself with a gasp. “Is that what you want to protect?”

“I'm not a businesswoman, Daniel,” Confessore says. “I don't have opinions.” But she memorizes his words as she leaves, ready to wire them up. Maybe this is all Eco wants to know, and the whole thing can be over. She will be, one more time, alone.

Confessore knows that some of the guards think she is always awake, and while it is not technically true, she does nothing that might convince them otherwise. She no longer even calls it insomnia, nor takes the pills that Eco gave her once for focus. She simply thinks of herself as no longer quite human, like a hermit crab grown into the shell of the cloisters.

It could be worse. The first month underground, Confessore became convinced that she was growing transparent, like the empty husk of a dead insect. She, who had dropped to sleep in minutes during the strikes, no longer dared to go to bed, because she was afraid that her body would finally dissolve if she stopped watching it. The bricked-up depths of the cloisters that she had never seen – but had heard, through the echoes when she tapped the right walls – whispered to her in the rare moments she slept, telling her secret histories that she could never remember on waking. (She has since scrabbled at Eco's records for details of the hidden rooms, and found only two words: _sanctuary_ and _ossuary_.) In her rare lucid moments she knew that this was only her mind decaying, starved of stimulus. She confirmed it with medical texts acquired through Eco, first downloaded to a gray-market bakelite pocket terminal, then in hard copies that came down the elevator. The company asked nothing of her in return, and sent no one to see her.

In the second month, a man had come down, flanked by guards, and she had subjected him to all the things Eco hired her for.

In the third month, she used cutlery to scrape a grid in the cement, a table of all the ways that she could die. She used the texts to chart a pain scale on the terminal, dragging methods up and down it with her stylus – slowly becoming the thing everyone had believed her to be all along, a scholar of cruelty. She debated with herself in the long waits where Eco had no victims to send her, talking loudly enough to fill the stagnant air. It was not courage or even cowardice that saved her, but curiosity, the morbid desire to see if she could last under her own self-inflicted torment.

She no longer keeps track of how long it has been, but her conversations with prisoners are like the furtive cigarettes she used to smoke. She can enjoy the sound of another human voice, but only if she remembers it can't last. She can't become dependent.

The wall terminal blinks; Eco has responded.

> IT'S A BEGINNING, says the terminal's sickly amber text.  
> TELL ME WHERE HE SELLS IT  
> AND HURT HIM  
> HURT HIM BADLY.

A document comes through, a wire call log gleaned from the lab tech dormitory records. Confessore understands the significance of what Eco has given her immediately. She doesn't understand the hatred, but she is more than familiar with it, and with what it means she's supposed to do.

Daniel is half-collapsed against the wall, and she has to shake him to get him focused on her. She rephrases Eco's query. He says exactly what she suspected he would: nothing.

She rubs the knife in her pocket like a worry stone, feeling its smooth edges. “If you're from out west, did you ever get to see the Rictus Coast?” she asks.

He looks at her warily, but contempt seems to outweigh his fear. “Of course not,” he spits. “That's for the... fucking ghoul tourists.”

Confessore has seen the housing complex only in travel tapes, and its snaggled, chalky cement towers have never ceased to mesmerize her. She knows their decay is so striking only because they were cheap, their walls slumping in the flooded streets after the company levee broke. But they still represent a civilized world she'll never see, because it crumbled into grotesquerie decades ago.

“Someday the cities here will be like that, you know,” she says softly. “Rich explorers will dive the elevator shafts looking for curiosities, and the ghoul tourists will follow. No one will remember the companies you're working with, or the cures you stole. But maybe they'll find this room in a guided tour, and they'll have a moment's thrill at knowing that this is where a man abandoned his closest confidante, in order to protect those things.”

Daniel looks up. “What?” he says.

“Well, who else would he be dialing to, from terminal...” she mentally reaches back to Eco's cache as she arranges her next words. “Terminal two twelve one dot zero three, every day, like clockwork.”

Anyone else might have missed it, but the way Daniel freezes tells Confessore that her bluff will pay off. “It seems to me they're who you ought to think about protecting. How good do you think you are, Daniel? How long will it take Eco to find your friend?”

“I don't have friends,” he says too quickly. “I told you – god, it's not worth this...”

Confessore clicks one cuff and pulls the hand down. She produces the trench knife, flicking it open so he can see: crude black hilt, fine white steel.

“Let me be more specific.” Confessore puts on the smooth, poisonous voice that she once savored the casual power of, a long time ago. “Would you like to wait until we start making our own calls, and watch me carve every one of his fingers... or her fingers... down to bone when Eco draws him out? Would you like me to show you how it feels?”

She grabs one of his fingers and pulls it straight, putting the knife to it. The point slides beneath the skin, and she lets blood paint her knuckles, its flow ticklish against them. Better to shock him now than to have to carry through with her threat.

“No,” he gasps. “Don't.”

“Then tell me.”

There was no doubt that he would crack, she knows that. But it's only when he speaks that she realizes how hard her heart has been beating.


	6. Eco is Eco

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which there is mostly hurt, some comfort, and a little patent infringement.

Confessore backs away slowly when he's finished, taking notes on her clipboard. In the light, Daniel can see hollows under her eyes, and an unsteadiness in her shoulders as she puts a hand on his chest again.

“I already-”

She shakes her head and holds him against the wall carefully, as her other hand goes up to free him. She catches him as he begins to fall, until he can slide to the floor unharmed – or as unharmed as he could possibly consider himself right now. There is a strange tenderness in it that almost makes him recoil.

Daniel tries to push her away, but his arms don't work, and he's shaking so hard his teeth chatter.

“Your legs will come back in a day, maybe, except for the ankle,” Confessore says. “Would you like me to help you to the be-”

“No!”

He shakes his head and tries to pull his limbs close against his naked body. He doesn't know what's going to become of him, but he never wants to see Confessore again, never wants to feel her touch.

“All right,” she says hoarsely. “All right.” He hears her graceless footsteps retreat, and the door squeak open.

“Wait,” he calls to her. “What's going to happen?”

“They'll check your story, and then – well, I don't know. Release you to the federals, maybe.”

“And--”

“You ought to rest.”

“And who is Eco?”

Confessore makes a low, humming growl in her throat. “The company, Daniel.”

“But you called her – you called her _her_. Who is it?”

“I told you: she's the company. She's always been, as far as I've known her.” She hacks a laugh. “Eco is Eco.”

It's the last he hears of her, save the heavy click of the door.

His body tries to cry, but it's too dry for tears. _Oh god_ , he mutters over and over. He sold them out, traded Kamara for the rest of them – told Confessore about fences, counterfeiters. It won't matter, he tries to tell himself; they've all been too careful for Eco to get at them. He doesn't even know their real names. But he thought he was careful here too, until they found him. Until _she_ found him.

What does it even mean, what Confessore said? Companies come in all sorts of configurations; he's heard of recorded backup personalities taking board positions, although serious businesses frown on it out west. A slow, predictable dead ancestor is dead weight, when the world changes so quickly. It doesn't bear trying to decipher, Daniel tells himself. The best he can hope for is prison, and to never think of Eco again. The worst...

The door opens again. He doesn't bother to lift his head, until he realizes that the walk is too heavy to be Confessore's and the scent of aftershave is too strong – it's roses, Daniel notes, one of the floral codes that he can never keep straight. And the hand that grabs his chin is too thick, too soft for her bony form.

“Fiona got you in the end, huh?”


	7. Clean Western Health

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which everything is about sex, except sex, which is about power.

Ethan Redder will never tell anyone that he once made a pass at Confessore. He's not sure she even understood when he'd done it, because she'd just looked at him with those creepy half-starved shark eyes, as if he'd asked directions to someplace she'd never been. Maybe she hadn't, because she's not pretty, when he thinks about it. It's the sharkishness that he likes about her, the dangerous competency that sets his pulse on edge whenever he convinces Eco to let him down. But for matters of the flesh, he turns to other sources.

Eco's latest find is a picture of clean Western health, or Redder supposes he was, before Confessore got to him. Now he's shivering on the floor, one hand held protectively against his chest. Redder's not even sure he's awake until he lifts his head, savoring the look of fear in his water-blue eyes.

The man – Daniel, Eco called him – flinches as Redder runs a hand down his arm, stopping to circle the bloodied skin of his wrist. He's still naked, the only warmth on his skin coming from the bruises Confessore has left.

“Stop it,” Daniel says weakly. Redder smiles. Slowly, making sure Daniel sees, he strips off his jacket, folding it neatly and pushing up his shirtsleeves. He twists his fingers tightly in Daniel's dark hair and pulls him forward, onto his knees.

“I think it's time to continue what we started.” He undoes his fly and watches the transition from fear to silent fury. He uses his other hand to grab Daniel's mottled, swollen one and squeeze, until he draws a stifled groan.

“I could break the rest – and I'm not her, so I couldn't put them back in right, either. Is that what you want?”

A quick, almost invisible shake of the head.

“Good boy.”

Redder is used to power, and he could hold it over any number of people he beds. But it's not like this – having a man who's probably never felt so helpless, already broken and bleeding when Redder forces his mouth open and shoves down his throat so hard he chokes. Daniel is clumsy even for someone with his injuries. He's never done this before, Redder thinks; he'll never forget the humiliation of his first time, assuming he lives long enough to have much of a memory.

For now, this is what Eco wants – she might not know the particulars, but she lets him downstairs, and she seems to understand his predilections. He's certainly worked long enough to know that she has no compunctions about what they do to outsiders. Even Confessore... he wonders if she's really never taken advantage of her position. Especially with someone like Daniel, with an unpretentious attractiveness that must be just as appealing to her as to Redder, assuming she goes in for men at all. He traces a hand down Daniel's neck, over his shoulders, feeling the tremor in his muscles. The sensation, the bare vulnerability in this kneeling body, is enough to finish him.

Redder slaps Daniel when he tries to get away from him, back against the wall. “Look at me.” He kicks him hard when he refuses, sending him to the floor clutching his side. “Come on, you can do better than that,” he says. “Let's get you cleaned up.”

He's not strong enough to drag Daniel to the small cement shower in the corner of the room, but he can put him in enough pain that he moves. The water is freezing when it hits his hand, but Daniel doesn't seem to notice, only raises his face to the water and drinks until it sets him coughing – it's probably the first he's gotten since they found him.

Redder makes him wash the blood from his wrists and hand, the sweat from his face, and drags him out and fucks him mercilessly, ignoring the translucence of his shirt where it touches Daniel's bare skin. He wants to hear him scream, but he stays stubbornly silent through the whole thing, until Redder exhausts himself and comes.

It's late, he thinks, although he would never know from underground. Confessore must get off on this – there's no way she could stand it down here otherwise.


	8. Unlucky Places

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Fiona doesn't have so much a moral code as a vague kind of ethical etiquette, Daniel experiences more of the world's diverse species of cruelty, and the pair of them have no one to talk to about it but each other.

Daniel waits until he's sure he is alone, every inch of him aching, to break down. He can barely do more than roll onto his side and draw in on himself for warmth, shaking. _Please_ , he whispers, unsure whose audience he is seeking and what he is asking for. _Please. Please._

A shape in the corner catches his eye – his fuzzy vision vaguely recognizes it as his discarded clothing. It takes no time to decide that however much it hurts to reach it, being no longer exposed is worth the cost.

If only any of him worked. He's moved only a few feet when the door opens again.

“I told you, you shouldn't be active like this,” says the figure above him in a familiar drawl. “Your body needs to focus on more important things. Lungs, heart. Limbs.”

“Are you trying to give me a – a science lesson?” he spits, giving up and curling in again. “Notes from the torture class at finishing school?”

Confessore steps over him neatly. “ _Dayniel_ , do you think I would be here if I had gone to finishing school?”

“I don't care where you went to school, I don't fucking...”

She puts a hand on his shoulder, and his vocal cords seize up, sweat pricking on his forehead. It comes to him that he has insulted a woman who nearly tore the skin from his fingers without even raising her voice to him.

But there is no pain. She slips fabric around him, so soft that he leans into it instinctively even as his panic holds. “I don't want...”

“You need to get off the floor before you freeze,” she says. “Put your arm around me.”

“Please. Leave. Please don't touch me.”

Confessore pulls the blanket tighter and gets a grip around his ribs, surprisingly strong for her skeletal frame. “I've seen men who want to die, Daniel,” she says. “I've seen them with bodies chewed up and minds that snapped. Ones I did it to, ones I didn't. But you aren't one of them. Whatever you tell yourself now, you – _you_ want to live. Now help me.”

The bed isn't much softer than the floor, but it's dry and smooth, and the blanket starts to conserve the little heat his battered body can produce. Confessore disappears and comes back with a glass of tinnily sweet soluble, tipping it slowly for him – it's probably as bad as their rations during the patent war, but that doesn't stop him from gulping it down. Then she lifts his injured hand and props the fingers on a splint, producing a twist of fragile-looking gauze to wrap them.

He knows he should be quiet, but the bile that he managed to hold through Redder's visit is uncontainable. “Is this – is this procedure? Do you have a checklist?” he asks. “How many people do you do this to? You just – just stay down here?”

Confessore clears her throat. “Would you like your clothes? Your glasses? I don't think they were more than cracked.”

Her evasion is its own answer, and he gets no more. She moves to his ankle and wraps it with halting turns of the hand, and leaves his clothes and glasses on the bed. He fits them over his eyes as she leaves, so he can see the door click shut in perfect focus, locking him back inside.

Daniel doesn't know how long he sleeps after that, but when he wakes, he finds he can stand enough to hobble to the side of the room and take another precious drink of water, even if the line in his injured ankle burns like a hot knife every time his foot touches the ground. Someone – Confessore, he supposes – has left a towel and some soap, as though he's in the world's worst hotel. But looking at the shower fills him with nausea, reminding him of Redder.

When the door opens, he thanks god that Redder would never wear the heavy, rustling ceramic weave he hears now. His gratitude dies when the guard pushes him to his knees and makes him open his mouth, fist twisted painfully in his hair. They come in ones and twos after that, men and women of Eco security, ready with fists and nightsticks if he delays in satisfying them. He retreats inside himself, no longer bothering to dress or even rise in between – they like him on the floor, where there's room to knock him down and watch him struggle before they start again.

Until finally it's Confessore who enters, the bulky clipboard dimly visible in one hand. Daniel draws himself in as much as he can manage, as if hiding from her. She only takes the blanket and drapes it around him wordlessly.

“Why haven't you?” he whispers as she crouches beside him.

Confessore looks down. “Haven't I what?”

“Why haven't you raped me?”

“Because no one ought to,” she says flatly. “I don't have any reason or right to hurt you now.”

“Would you have, if I hadn't – if you'd had to go further?”

“There would always be better ways. Ways that aren't... petty self-indulgence.”

He doesn't know why he's trying to draw an answer from her, because he knows he probably doesn't want to hear it. Maybe he just needs to be reminded that whatever little comforts she provides now, Fiona Confessore is not his friend, and she's not his protector.

“What if – I don't know – what if Eco told you to do it?”

She sighs. “I could tell you I wouldn't – that I would never go so low. But there are other moral high grounds I can't safely claim, Daniel. Refusing orders is one of them.”

He would be frightened, repulsed, by her answer, if not for the antediluvian weariness of its delivery. _Who are you?_ He remembers asking. _A revenant._

Confessore looks for a second as though she's got something more to say. But she only brings his glasses to him again, straightening a bent wire as she hands them rover.

“Where are you from?” he asks as he rubs the oily ridges of his tormenters' prints off their lenses with the blanket. “I don't know accents, but it can't be here, can it?”

Her laugh is raw, the noise of someone who hasn't had to think about how it might sound in a long time. “Have you ever been to the Keys down south?” She doesn't wait for him to answer. “Of course you haven't. People only leave, from there.”

“They keep pictures of it in conference rooms where I'm from,” Daniel says. “It's beautiful.”

He realizes how stupid it sounds once he's said it. The Northwest was beautiful too, in its own arid way, when he bivouacked alongside Kamara under its indigo sky – so dark that he'd seen stars there, for the first time in his life. It wasn't the scenery that fueled their nightmares – the ones that Kamara still woke from shaking sometimes, staring into the ceiling while he tried to melt the space between them with his touch.

Where is she, now? He doesn't know how long it's been since the last call out, and the longer she stays, the more fragile her safety becomes – assuming Eco hasn't tried to pick her up already. He can't think about her now, because he's not going to cry in front of Confessore.

Confessore doesn't seem offended by the comment. “So is California,” she says. “I'd have never given up someplace so lucky.”

“It's not lucky for most people,” he says. It hadn't been for Kamara, whose parents asphyxiated in a packing plant before they ever met. The rest of her young life is a blank for him, because she always asked to fill it with his instead, drinking in his details of childhood corporate picnics and recruiting parties. Not so much, he thinks, unlike Confessore with her tapes. Daniel knows that in their relationship, Kamara is the survivor, the one who can find the cracks of a world-machine and fit herself inside them. But he can at least shelter her in his memories, smooth her hard edges with his own calm. Or, until now, he could. If he somehow leaves this place, it will be with more scars than he will want to show her.

His eyes sting, and he blinks away tears behind his glasses, hoping that Confessore isn't watching. He gets control of himself by watching her finger trace the edges of her clipboard, corner after corner.

“Your friend,” Confessore says, “They were from there?” He hesitates, and she shakes her head. “I'm sorry,” she says. “I don't have a right to questions, either. Not now.”

“Yes,” he says, aware that his voice is cracking slightly. “She was. We met up north. But she was.”

“I'm sorry,” Confessore says again. “Out here's unlucky too.”


	9. There Are Worse Things Than Money

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the president of Eco has a talk with a fellow pawn, we learn Fiona's purpose, and there is no ethical interrogation under capitalism.

Lucy Ratliff knows who's on the other end of the autophone line before she answers, because no one else would call the president of Eco in the middle of the night. Contrary to legend, she knows, Fiona Confessore does sleep. She does not do it often, nor at hours that any woman in the waking world would find acceptable.

“Hello?” she says anyway, once she's gotten out of bed and thrown on a wrapper, leaving Christina sleeping behind her. After all, she's never sure what sort of Confessore she's going to get. More than any of them at the company, her moods seem to change at Eco's whim, following the current company ethos.

“Lucy?”

“Yes, Fiona?”

“I wanted to talk.”

It's quiet Confessore, then, with the voice of a child at Sunday School. Not the one who will pick apart a body with the listless efficiency of a threshing machine, the one Eco keeps on something vaguely resembling a payroll.

The first time Ratliff had met Confessore, that hesitant voice had made her skin crawl. Ratliff had only been promoted days ago, a terminal message informing her that her typing pool job had been terminated and she was wanted on the executive floor – she'd thought she was being given notice, until she walked out the elevator and found her new title on a door in freshly etched brass. But she had heard the name long before that, at a party celebrating some new formula or other. One of her fellow secretaries had brought a flask of Quantico and passed it around in a corner, where they wouldn't have to pretend to pay attention to the scientists' long, circular discussions of the latest patent war negotiation. The place was depressing enough without thinking about atrocities happening half a world away – although she suspected that was why the scientists liked it, because it made Eco's dingy halls feel safe and even moderately functional by comparison.

“But come on, it's not like we can judge,” the holder of the Quantico muttered. “Holier-than-thous in there went through the strike just like all of us. They paid Confessore's commissions much as any of the bosses.”

Ratliff hemmed noncommittally. The strikes were best behind them – it never helped anyone to think about the past. But curiosity got the better of her.

“Confessore?” she asked, rolling the name on her tongue.

The typist – Martha, Ratliff remembers – snorted. “I'll be damned, really?” she said. “Maybe I'm the only one who remembers anything around here.”

“I'm new,” said Ratliff defensively. “Or – newer than that, than the strike.”

Martha took a gulp from the flask and coughed. “I should have saved her reports, the ones I had to enter back then – they always wanted them reformatted to feed the servers.” She leans close, the scent of fermented fig on her breath. “Who the hell wants to know the sound of somebody's eyeballs tearing? It doesn't even make a sound. Apparently.”

“Dam-- I mean, goodness,” said Ratliff, narrowly maintaining a secretary's decorum. “Why?”

“Why else? Money,” said Martha. “Good business in making people tell you things the don't want to. Whatever she got for it... I wouldn't have for ten times as much.” She shivered theatrically and smiled, the same stiffly sardonic grin she gave when one of the scientists finally buttonholed them an hour later. “Eleven, and now we're talking.”

Ratliff did look up the reports when Eco picked her as the new president, if only to exercise her newfound power. It made her only mildly nauseated, because it was almost too far from her real life to imagine. Worse was the cold, smothering knowledge that this was all done for an entity that she now controlled, if only in name. But the worst would come only later, when Ratliff realized that Martha had been, for once, not cynical enough. Eco hadn't deployed her pet monster for money. She barely seemed to care about it, nor about the sheer uselessness of so much Confessore had brought her. Martha had painted an unmatchable fiend in Ratliff's mind, but what emerged from the reports was a poorly honed tool, sawing bluntly against labor organizers and rival firms.

Then she learned that the tool was still cutting, and Eco invited her down to meet it.

She hadn't even known about the floor where she was staying, much less her living space there. One wall of Confessore's room was lined with cheap foolscap books, so tightly packed that they seemed more like a bulkhead than a library. There was a shiplike feel to the whole place, as though Ratliff had drifted upon some abandoned, rusting supertanker from the Razes and found a woman living there. A woman with the body of an etiolated mantis and a voice centuries younger than her eyes.

Confessore stood, pushing aside the wing of a fold-in metal desk. She offered a firm, bony handshake and a “Charmed, I'm sure,” but she seemed nearly as leery of Ratliff as Ratliff was of her, albeit in a different way – Ratliff got the feeling of being approached like a wild animal, by a child who knew just enough stealth to not scare it away. It would have been almost funny, except that when she checked Eco's records, she realized those hands would have been on some hapless would-be protester's bloodied body the week before. It was not money, but order, that sent Confessore's victims down the elevator. Confessore's, Eco's – did it really matter?

If it doesn't, Ratliff thinks now, then Confessore's victims are as much hers as well. But there will always be someone willing to fill their roles, just as she filled the last president's absence – years later, she still doesn't know why he left or where he went. Does it help anyone to leave?

“What is it, Fiona?” she asks.

“Is Mother home?” It's their simple code, arranged long ago down in Confessore's Faraday bell of a home.

Ratliff hits a button and masks their words with galvanic static. “She's sleeping.” She doesn't actually know if Eco analyzes their autophone calls, or if she's found a way around static. She takes her comforts where she can.

“It's about the man, the spy. Ethan and the staff don't have to – to use him like they do.”

“I don't know what you're talking about. Use who, how?”

“Mother sent him down, said he'd stolen something, but I got it back. All they're... hurting him for is satisfaction. You know what Ethan's like.”

“No I don't.” Ratliff goes out of her way to learn as little as she can about the rest of Eco's management. She comes to her office in the mornings and passes the time between her rare meetings with arts and crafts. Currently, she cross-stitches wall-sized adaptations of old abstract art, chaos broken into easily manageable squares of thread. She talks to Confessore only because they seem to share a kindred fatalism, and because she has a suspicion Confessore would go mad if they stopped.

“Well, can't you ask her?” Confessore says. “Just – there has to be something.”

“She'll probably just tell you to kill him, you know.”

The sound of Confessore's breath is small and sharp, like a needle. “I keep... I keep hoping she's changed. I keep hoping every time's the last time, Lucy.”

“Why would she? Machines don't change.”

“She didn't used to be like this, though. Not this bad, not when I started.”

“Entropy doesn't count,” says Ratliff. But she takes Confessore's point – _for the better_ , she should have added.

“Can you just tell Ethan and security, then? Tell them to stop.”

“They won't listen to me.” The guards might, individually. But the head of security knows that Eco is her own master, and so does Ethan Redder, she knows that much about him. “I'll see if there's anything I can do.”

It's a lie and they both know it, and Ratliff hates herself for it as much as she does whenever she learns of some terrible thing being done in her name – her, an ascended typist and reformed cheapside shopgirl.

“Lucy – she's getting crazier, isn't she?”

“I never knew what she was like when she was sane,” says Ratliff. “I couldn't tell you now.”

“But there's nothing we can do about it – there's not, is there?”

Ratliff sighs and chokes back the winged, scalding thing that begins to beat against the inside of her chest at times like this, when she imagines the next year, the next decade, under Eco. And then she looks back at the door, where Christina will be waiting, pleasantly unaware of anything except the nice house and the long hours and the occasional, inexplicable late call. “No,” she tells Confessore. “Nothing we can do at all.”

*

She doesn't have any right to be angry at Ratliff, Confessore thinks as she hangs up the stiff black receiver on the side of her terminal – routed to go to a few executive phones and nowhere else, until Ratliff began forwarding her own calls home. The woman has at least handled her share of imaginary power without letting it go to her head, a rare enough trait in a human being. Confessore might wish she had more backbone, but who is she to talk? Ratliff gets by. Confessore tries not to imagine how, because it's better to forget all that, everything that might be happening in the world above her.

She thinks instead of Eco, wired into the walls around her. Confessore barely knew what a backup was when she came out of the Keys; she'd treated them first as ghosts and then as oracles, until she could grasp the fact that they were little more than calculators full of words and data and simple simulated emotions. And that, in turn, had inoculated her against the truth: that Eco is both ghost and oracle, and something else besides. She is a rat king of dead memories from people whose names Confessore will never know, their formulated minds scraped clean and digested.

Are there other things like Eco, running her competitors? Confessore has only ever known one, but then she has known so few things in her life. Maybe she has always been a pawn of some analytic engine or other. Maybe they are all an inverted clockworks: human gears performing for the amusement of machines.

What should she have done? Ethan Redder has learned to take advantage of his role, Ratliff to box it out. If there are better options, she hasn't encountered them.


	10. The War Crimes Tribunal

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which we learn why Fiona is here in the first place.

Sometimes, when he isn't careful, Daniel finds himself listening for Confessore's footsteps on the cement outside with a kind of longing. It's only because she's the lesser of so very many evils, he tells himself. It's because she brings him tasteless preserved fruit or warm grits with formulated butter, and she'll put it within his reach and stand back before he can worry if she's going to take advantage of his weakness. When she's made her good intentions clear she rewraps his hand and ankle, and he manages to stay the pounding of his heart for long enough to let her without panicking.

“How often do you do this?” he asks. “How many people have you... hurt...”

“Down here? I've never counted,” she says. “Up there? I'm not sure I could have counted if I tried.”

“Why did you?”

“Because I was paid, obviously.” Her voice has a kind of forced lightness to it.

“That's... that doesn't seem like enough, for most people.”

“I suppose that's the secret to my success.”

“And is this your reward? All this?”

He's doing it again, baiting her. It means he trusts her, in a way, he supposes – she's the only one whose limits he knows. And again, all she does is look down at him on the bed. “Apparently.”

She sets her teeth, and Daniel recoils a little, afraid he's finally upset her. He's not sure if it frightens him because she'll hurt him, or because he'll lose the only person who's shown him kindness. “How?” he asks quietly.

Confessore cracks her knuckles one by one – first the big ones, then the little joins in the middle of her fingers, and finally the bottom row again, pulling back until they pop. Daniel tries not to think about his own hand. “Did you ever hear about the big strike, when you were out in California?”

He shakes his head. “A little, maybe.”

“I'd just arrived up here, when it started. I needed work – I'd never had it before, the way real people – people outside the Keys – meant it. They hired me because they would have hired anyone, as long as they were willing to scab, but I didn't know it. I was proud of it.” Her accent sets words stumbling over each other, and it takes her a moment to collect herself. “That's what I learned there – that you can go a long way just by doing what rich people want.”

“Eco hired you?”

“No, not then. I don't remember the name of the company. They were all fighting – over union loyalties, trade agreements. I don't even remember who it was attacked us, on the packing floor. He was union, I think – well, I know. I know because I was the closest to him, and they told me to help hold him while they put out the fire. And then one of the bosses told me to get to a back room – this little man, gray hair. He told me he needed me to help him break the enemy, like he was some... tactical commander. But me, I didn't know at the time how stupid it was. I was proud. I was proud he'd picked me.”

Her voice shrinks. “But I don't even know what I got from the man, besides his name. I don't know if what I did even mattered – if he told me the truth at all. They didn't care. It was all mixed up, back then, at cross-purposes. You could never stay in one company too long, because they started getting paranoid. And they all poached from each other – I must have switched sides half a dozen times. And then... then there was Eco.”

Even Seaboard blood, Daniel thinks, is shed rotten. Whatever else it was, the patent war's sides had never been in doubt. It had been stupid, needless blood, yes, but it made a kind of sense. His first thought is that at least he's found something to cheer Kamara up with, when she wakes up the next time. But then he remembers that there probably won't be a next time – that the Seaboard will have claimed him too.

“I keep thinking back, wondering if I could have told it would be worse, that Eco was worse," Confessore continues. "But the truth is, she wasn't, not until it was too late.”

“What do you mean?” he asks.

“There were supposed to be rules, in the strike, people you didn't touch. People who mattered. I never knew their faces, how could I? I didn't even get names, not back then. Only questions. And...” Her narration has grown cold, like someone reciting words in a language they don't understand. “They sent me a scion. A first-born son, big sundries company. I still don't know what Eco wanted with him, because all I remember of her questions is that I didn't understand them. But I asked them anyway, and when he didn't talk I did... well, what it is I do. But wars, in the end, they're all politics--”

“I know how wars are,” Daniel snaps.

“Your kind, maybe, and your kind of company politics. But here... there's a real state, you know, a real federal authority. A war crimes tribunal, as they say – a nice way to pick up the unlucky pieces when everyone is ready to go home.”

He can hear Kamara's voice inside his head – _well goodness, that must have been so hard for you._ But the strikes, they ended years ago. And if that's how long she's been down here...

“You're hiding.”

“That was what Eco offered me, yes. But now... it's been so long, I don't know what I would be hiding from. So I just keep doing what I've always done.”

“And what's that?”

She laughs a little and starts doing her knuckles again, twisting them until Daniel almost winces when they refuse to pop. “Were you even listening?” she asks. “Whatever I'm told.”


	11. The Killing of a Flashboy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the idea that cruelty can be justified by pragmatism is only a convenient fiction that men and women tell themselves in order to feel proactive in times of crisis. And that after enough false alarms, all times become times of crisis.

The version that she tells him is bowdlerized, of course. When she looks back, the worst part isn't remembering her actions, but the lie behind them: that she was good at what she did. She wasn't paid for getting information; she was paid for making company men and women feel powerful. She was paid because she kept showing up, when anyone else would have quit in disgust. She was paid because she didn't care if she was paid – she only wanted the reassurance that someone thought her worth paying.

And in the end she still doesn't know why Eco sent the man to her. She's thought of asking many times since the machine first spoke to her directly through the terminal, revealing herself with no intermediary. But the more she's learned over the years the more she thinks there is no reason, at least not one that would make sense to anything but the wreckage of Eco's artificial minds. Just as there's no reason now for Daniel's suffering.

She sits at the terminal for hours after she leaves, picking at its edges. Slowly, she slides down the keyboard and dials.

> DANIEL AUBREY, she says.  
> HE TOLD YOU EVERYTHING  
> SHOULD WE SEND HIM OFF?

She imagines the messages traveling up Eco's spines to parts of the building she's never seen, tripping mental switches to produce the words that come next.

> SOON, Eco says.

> CAN YOU KEEP EVERYONE ELSE AWAY, UNTIL THEN? IT'S A DISTRACTION.

There are few delays in Eco's thoughts during simple conversations like this. Any gap, like the one she leaves now, is wholly intentional.

> I AM MAKING AN EXAMPLE.

Confessore stops herself from simply pecking an apology and signing out.

> WHY? I DON'T SEE ANY REASON.

She wishes Ratliff were here. She's pretended to be a president for so long that she understands the rhetoric of negotiation. Force is all that Confessore knows, and it's not something she can deploy against Eco.

> YOU DON'T NEED TO.  
> ENJOY YOUR REST  
> YOU EARNED IT.

The line goes dead.

She wants to rage at Eco sometimes, bash the terminal to pieces. But she knows that in the end she'll do whatever she wants, because Eco is mother and lover and sister to her, the only ones she's ever had.

It doesn't make her blind. Her family is a monstrous one, decaying as surely as any gothic dynasty in the horror novels on her shelves. It has sent her an innocent man and had her break him. And now it wants her to stand by while he's destroyed altogether.

The elevator chimes. Ethan Redder's ruddy face beams out at her, flanked by a pair of security. Confessore looks him up and down, surveying the sloe snifter in his hand and his fiberglass mohair suit. She'll have to look up the style later, make Eco buy her a new catalog. She needs to be able to name this monstrosity, like a demon.

“Got a party upstairs,” Redder says, grinning.

“Why are you here, then?” Confessore asks. She regrets it the moment she does, because she's already guessed the answer, and she's set him up for a quip she's sure he's rehearsed in his head.

“Favors.” His hair is hard as ice, like the flashboys back at the start of the strikes – it's funny how these styles come around, at odd years she can't predict. “Want to come?”

She shakes her head, watching the guards open the door to Daniel's cell. They are all automata, she reminds herself, and it makes no more sense to rebel than for a gear to rebel against a clock. There are only those who enjoy the turning, and those who endure it.


	12. Hypercard Stack

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When you're rich, they'll let you do anything.

Daniel wakes in time to hear the voices and realize that something is wrong. He slides out of bed, hissing as his ankle hits the ground, and looks for anything he could fight back with. But the room is nearly empty of anything that's not fixed in place, except for him – and he might as well be.

They take him down immediately, one of them slamming his head back against the wall until he stops struggling, momentarily dazed. When his mind resets his wrists are cuffed again, and one of them has a rough hand around his neck.

Redder slaps it away, his voice already thickening with alcohol. “Wait your turn,” he says, an edge of menace in his jocularity. “Respect your betters.”

The guards don't respond to his insult, but the hand withdraws, and they pull Daniel into the hallway. One of them fits a blindfold over him, and all he notes of the journey is that he never realized that the air in Eco's dull offices was so fresh. They lead him to a second elevator, and he registers the faint push of gravity against his bare feet as it draws them upward. There is another exit, and another door, and a sudden light that he feels even through the blindfold. And they push him to his knees, and leave.

He hears murmurs in front of him, but no one speaks. Redder's tacky glass jacket whispers as he walks behind him. Redder pulls something stiff and tight around his neck, yanking him back until his neck is bared and Daniel finds himself gasping for air. He leans down and pulls the blindfold off.

It's a rococo conference salon in the style of every corporate thriller tape Daniel has ever played, a half-dozen men and a couple of women in undone ascots and sloe gin snifters around its table and a deck of hypercards atop it. Their eyes pierce his clothes, and he looks through them at the dark wall behind, trying not to give them the satisfaction of casting his own eyes down.

“Isn't he good?” Redder asks the room, stagecraft in his voice. He produces something sharp and presses it against Daniel's shirt collar. “You should see the rest of him.”

He hooks the blade under the edge of his shirt and begins to cut. Daniel shivers – not from the humiliation of being disrobed here, but from the notion of losing his only set of clothes for good. “You don't need to do that,” he gasps. “I – let me.”

Redder withdraws the knife. “Yeah?” he says. “Let's make a deal: suck me, and I consider it.”

He freezes and starts to shake his head.

“No? Maybe another deal, then: I cut your clothes off, gag you with them, and fuck you over the table.”

There's going to be no way to win tonight, Daniel realizes. “No,” he whispers. “I'll do it.”

His wrists are still bound as Redder grabs his hair and throws him off balance. He tries not to think about the people watching them or how transparent he must be for someone to manipulate him like this. A night can only go on so long, he reminds himself. He's pathetically grateful when Redder finishes and unhooks his cuffs just long enough to order him to strip, keeping a hold on the chain around his neck.

“The hand too,” Redder says coldly, pointing at the splints that Confessore has wrapped his fingers against. Shaking, he manages to twist the fabric off, trying to roll with the cresting wave of pain. Finally he's kneeling naked before them, and Redder replaces the blindfold, yanking him toward the table. Daniel can feel the body heat of the guests and the trace of Redder's fingers against his scalp.

He hears Redder louder, addressing the table. “Winner gets him,” he says. “And you can do what you want – he's not picky.”

Daniel can't see the game, but he feels Redder's response to every hand in the tension of his grip. He hears the genial murmur of society folk, versed in exchanging intimacies while revealing nothing. It's no wonder that they don't seem to think he's human – they're too careful to assume that anyone is, besides themselves.

A-ha, he hears in an unfamiliar voice, and there's the rustle of cards being collected, the sound of a chair scraping the floor. A cruel tug on his lead, sending him stumbling toward something he can't see. The polite voices murmur appreciation and jealousy, sounding more genuine than they have all night.

A door closes, shutting them out. Based on the voice and the blunt hands, it's a man who's pushing him down, keeping a hand on his collar. “Stay,” the man tells him, as though he could do anything else. He manages to keep silent when something thin and rigid strikes him, until the blows get so heavy that his body alternates between searing pain and sickening numbness. The man pushes him flat when he collapses and takes him, as he grits his teeth and tries to keep from retching. The man licks the side of Daniel's ear and tells him to be grateful – that he'll find much worse out there. The frightening thing is, Daniel doesn't doubt him.

Redder is dealing a new hand when the man brings him back, keeping a hand on his face. The winner draws Daniel up immediately and hits him in front of all of them, leaving him to spit blood on the ground. It's the last thing he can remember clearly. The rest is a cycle of pain and numbness, until someone pulls the hood on again and drags him away. He's just aware enough to take his clothing as it happens.


	13. Memento Mori

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Fiona could have what she wants, now. She doesn't take it.

Confessore undresses and lies flat in bed, keeping the lights on. These are the times that she can't stop the cement above from closing in on her, no matter how many times she rearranges her shelves of books or shakes out her clothes. She remembers the blindingly blue sky above the Keys, the cool spray of mist on the beaches. Time has buffed away the cruel heat and the irradiated flies that would nest in her family's dry goods, all the parts that she used to remind herself of when she felt cursed. And tonight she thinks of them to punish herself for being so weak, yet again.

She gives Daniel time when she hears the elevator descend, to recover however fits him best. Then she puts on a dark suit and combs her hair and makes her way to his room.

He's wrapped the blanket around himself, but he's otherwise standing naked, his back welted and bleeding. As she closes the door he turns sharply and nearly falls, catching himself on the sink with his bad hand and groaning.

She waits for him to right himself. “You should resplint these,” she says, turning off the water for him.

He limps to the bed, avoiding her eyes. “What's the point?” he mutters. “You were lying the whole time – about letting me go – weren't you?”

“No. I told you I don't know.”

“Like you didn't know he was coming back?”

“I didn't know that either.”

He lays on his side and closes his eyes, and she wonders if he's passed out, until she sees tears condense around the edges of his eyes and escape his lashes, trickling down his face. She tries to remember crying, in the early days – curling against the wall at night after sessions with one of Daniel's unlucky predecessors, swearing she'd never do it again, knowing that she would.

For all his tears, he's stronger than she is, she thinks. It takes more to be good, to be kind, knowing that kindness is a vulnerable act. It takes more courage to be hurt, and keep going, than to hurt.

Confessore is still watching Daniel when he opens his eyes. She sees him start to pull away, and then stop, deliberately, and capture her gaze. He reaches a hand out and takes hers, pulling it to his face.

“You... you could help me, though, couldn't you?” he asks. Confessore freezes. He slides her fingers over his lips, parts them for her. “Please help me. I'll do anything.”

His other hand comes up to brush her hair. The sensation hits her like an electric shock, sending a flush of heat through her body. How long has it been since anyone has touched her willingly, like this? She leans in as he runs his hand over her ear, down to her neck.

Suddenly his hand stiffens, jerking his fingers in. Confessore starts.

He shakes his head. “No, it's...”

She knows what it is. He can't quite keep up the pretense that the fingers she dislocated aren't aching as he tries to seduce her, or that the weals on his back aren't making it hard to lean up for a kiss. He's trying desperately to pretend that he wants her even as it's hurting him, the margins of his eyes red with tears. She disgusts him, and she ought to.

Confessore bites the inside of her lip in frustration and peels his hands off her as gently as she can, trying to ignore the aching softness of his skin. “You have someone, Daniel,” she says. “Hold onto her.”

“God damn it!” He pulls back now, putting a hand over his eyes. “Why do you think I'm doing this? I want to – I want to fucking see her again!”

His voice breaks down into a furious sob. Confessore lets herself take one last look at him as a woman, and one as a faithful servant of her company, before putting both away. “Maybe you can,” she tells him.

He receives her words without reaction, as though he's not allowing himself to process them. “You said you couldn't leave,” he finally says.

“The elevator won't come without Eco's permission.”

He raises his head, and she senses the first signs of interest. “So, what, we hack it?”

“You don't understand, Daniel. Eco isn't a terminal. She isn't an it. Eco... Eco is Eco.”


	14. The Age of the Smart Machine

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A daring, convoluted escape, in which everyone's loyalties become confused.

Daniel stops, hearing Confessore repeat what she told him however long ago he broke. “What do you mean?” he asks.

“You asked how they caught you,” says Confessore. “Eco lives on data, whatever she can get of it. She loves patterns. She's a machine, after all. Just... a smart machine.”

There are true formulated intelligences of a sort in California. He's never met one, though – Alphanum keeps them contained, because they're inhuman, unpredictable creations. “She's a backup, you mean? Something like that?”

“She contains backups. She is... I don't know. An amalgam. I don't trust either of us to trick her, not by sending some sort of fake signal.”

Daniel's stomach twists. His body is still aching, his eyes itching from tears and lack of sleep. It's only a matter of time until Redder or someone else comes back for him, and he can't stand another night. He'd rather die, he thinks, with a silent apology to Kamara as he does so.

“But Ka--... my partner, she would always say that a network was the most vulnerable part of a company. I mean, after people, but she was never so good with them.”

Confessore chews her lip until a spot of blood appears, whisking it up with a dart of the tongue. “Not here,” she says. “And even if it were – the most vulnerable things are usually the most dangerous, when they're pushed.”

“I'm – look, I'm not staying here,” says Daniel. “It's not like things could get worse--”

“Don't ever say that, Daniel,” Confessore snaps. “I could describe to you a dozen ways things could get worse in the next half-hour, without even thinking about it. Worse is my occupation. And Eco knows everything that I do.”

He feels tears welling up again, and he squeezes his hand, letting the pain focus him. “Then...”

“But your... friend wasn't wrong – not about people,” says Confessore. “Come with me.”

She offers him an arm and he takes it reluctantly, limping out of his cell.

He has imagined Confessore's quarters as monkish and reserved. In reality they are bursting, stuffed with texts and tapes and racks of clothing that no one will ever see. He feels another stab of unexpected pity for her, trying to squeeze an entire life into this small room.

“Is this...” Her terminal is one of those unique creations of the East, in all its baroque primitivity – its bakelite surface chipped, the corners notched with a regularity that suggests deliberate mutilation. Only the self-sterilizing authentication needle is clean, gleaming silver in its round depression.

“I have a call to make.”

She punches her thumb onto the needle and picks up a receiver, pecking an address on the little fold-out keyboard. Then she sets it aside and reaches behind one of her books, for a small autophone that she clips into the wire.

“Can't trick her, huh?” Daniel says, watching her twist it into place.

“This has been my sole method of deception, in who knows how many years. I wouldn't expect to be lucky enough to get another.”

“Then who are you calling?”

She ignores him, long hair falling over her face. “Lucy?”

He thinks back to Kamara's reconnaissance – Lucy Ratliff, Eco president. She's selling him out, then, she has to be. He looks in vain for something he could use to attack her.

“Is Mother home?” Confessore asks. “Good. Lucy, I have a... question.” There is a long gap, as Confessore mutters something he can't hear and waits for a response. He can't make out the rest of the conversation that follows, except for two raised syllables, exhaled like a desperately long-held breath: _thank god_. Then, louder: “Would you please come visit us?”

That's all. She hangs up the 'phone and tugs her hair back over her ears, which Daniel sees for the first time are not pierced. Their whole, pillowy lobes seem strangely young around her ageless face, its eyes half-closed in what looks like exhaustion or prayer.

“What's happening?” he asks.

“It's still early. Get some rest,” Confessore says. “You'll hear it when she comes.”

He can't stand the idea of going back to his room, so he sits in the hall with his head on his knees, dazed. When the chime comes he half-forgets Confessore's words and scrambles to his feet, fearing Redder and the guards. But for once luck favors him, and he sees the doors open on a tall, dark woman in a red chintz suit.

So this is Ratliff, he thinks. Slumped against the wall, he has to look up to get a clear look at her face, and when he does he thinks it is the kind of face that could be picked to lead anything, with a strong brow and deep-set eyes and hair slicked back under a band of the same red fabric. She frowns.

“Where's Fiona?”

Confessore opens the door behind him. “Where I always am,” she says. “A creature of habit.”

Ratliff still has her eyes on Daniel, probably taking the same inventory of him as he has of her. How much of what goes on here does she know? She has little control of it, if Confessore is telling the truth. Even if Confessore isn't, it probably behooves a president to know as little as possible about their company's filthy, scrabbling day-to-day operations, because that's the only way to preserve the illusion that what they make is worth the sacrifice. The only question is whether she has an excuse.

Ratliff gives the sort of nervous smile that's little more than a lifting of the lips, folding her hands across her forearms as if she's just realized they exist and isn't sure what to do with them. “After all these years, huh?” she says finally.

“After every damn one,” says Confessore. “Why – did you expect me to say they were good ones?”

“Fiona, I never have known what you thought was good. I'm not sure there's anybody that does.”

Ratliff's poise is alien, or perhaps divine. It's fascinatingly unlike the aspirationally powerful men and women he's known, who maintain the pretense that nothing but hard work separates them from a coder or a janitor. Still, Daniel wishes Confessore would take Ratliff back to her room, because then he could lie down and take the weight off his burning ankle while they engage in their guarded, circuitous parody of conversation.

“I don't blame you – for anything, you know,” says Confessore. “I always expected you did the best you could.”

“Oh, come on, that's not true. It's not, you ought to know.” Daniel starts as he realizes Ratliff is addressing him. She looks him up and down again, looks away, and turns back to Confessore. “And I can't help you either, not once you're out the door.”

“I know,” says Confessore. “I wouldn't ask.” She puts out one gaunt, milky hand for Ratliff to take in her own chiseled, mahogany one, and when they shake, they hang on a little longer than courtesy demands. Then Confessore pulls away and reaches into the folds of her flocked blue waistcoat: black hilt, white steel. Her knife. “Are you sure?” she asks. “Mother will wonder.”

Ratliff turns her back to Confessore and tips aside her tight bun of black hair. “Let her,” she whispers, as Confessore puts the knife to her throat. “I think she likes me.”

Confessore looks back at Daniel, and he thinks that for a second she forgot him. “You'll have to walk,” she says over Ratliff's shoulder. “But just a little ways, I think.”

He nods and pushes himself off the wall, stifling a yelp. He follows them into the open elevator, where Confessore gestures with the knife, and Ratliff puts her thumb against the terminal's print pad and hits a combination. Confessore closes her eyes, and Daniel sees her chest heave as they ascend. He doesn't breathe at all, the pain in his ankle too intense to jar with unnecessary motion. He keeps expecting alarms to sound, or a silent condemnation to appear on the terminal. But the elevator's doors retract like a beetle's wings, and outside is the corridor he remembers from – god? How long ago?

His ankle can hardly hold his weight, but Confessore slides on, trancelike, through a series of doors that Ratliff indicates with the sweep of a finger. A lock of hair is sticking to the side of Confessore's mouth, but she doesn't brush it away, and Daniel focuses intently on its curve, losing his pain in the dark, fine strands. _It's not going to work_ , he tells himself. _Don't hope for it._ It won't work, but at least he will have Confessore there to cut his throat when it fails. _I'm sorry, Kam. I'm sorry, I'm sorry –_

The last door opens, and Daniel's eyelids contract. When he's able to open them again, he sees Confessore with one hand clasped over her face, barely holding onto the knife in the other. The world outside the doorway might as well be a sharp cliff over an ocean, for all he can see of it.

A spidery hand grabs his wrist. “Come on,” says Confessore, eyes still closed. “It's time to go.” She releases Ratliff's neck, and as she does, Daniel sees her mouth into her ear: _Thank you, Lucy._

“Goodbye, Fiona,” whispers Ratliff.

Then they are out the door into the punishing light, and it is all over.

They've gone out a side door, onto a cracked gravel freight lot. The rocks embed themselves in Daniel's bare feet and burn, throbbing in time with his ankle. As he looks over, though, he realizes that he's doing better than Confessore. She's shrunk against the wall, eyes squeezed shut and hands pulled into her dark sleeves, far too long for the weather.

He could leave her, he thinks. He could leave her for Eco or a shipping house or a visiting boss, whoever finds her first. In sum total, he owes this woman nothing.

But he can't – she's like a deep-sea creature brought up to the surface and suddenly fragile, gasping for air. He reaches for her hand.

“Come on,” he tells her. “It's time to go.”

He watches her work her body away from the wall bone by bone, until she is straight and rigid against his grip. She keeps one hand glued over her eyes, occasionally fanning its fingers to peer between them.

Daniel makes his way around the building until he understands where they are. With luck, they can make it to a hostel or even just a cafe, because how long has it been since he's eaten... He has no money, he realizes. It was taken from him with his shoes and jacket, in the clip with his false papers. He isn't going to cry, he tells himself. It's lost, and he may be too, but he isn't going to cry.

“Do you know the back streets?” Confessore asks him.

He shakes his head. “I've only been here a few... weeks, I think.”

“Then read the signs to me. I would, but...” she gestures at her deep, useless eyes.

He does, under his breath, and she points and tries to describe the landmarks he should be finding. She pulls her lip into her teeth every time one is no longer there.

“Where are we going?” Daniel finally asks.

“The bank,” says Confessore.

“I don't have—”

“Not the trust's bank,” she says. “Swiss.”

The Swiss banks are a relic, the meaning behind their name a mystery to Daniel – they've got nothing to do with Switzerland, or what's left of it now. But he at least thinks he understands her purpose.

“You've got a numbered account?” he says.

“I did get paid, once upon a time.” Confessore says with an arch laugh. “And my luxuries were cheaper.”

The Swiss bank is a little storefront between a hulking church and a nameless office building, shabbier than Eco. Confessore has her fingers split wide by now, forehead and cheekbones pink with heat.

“Come on,” she says.

Daniel looks at his bare feet. “I think you ought to be alone for this,” he says. Confessore swallows and walks inside, with the finality of a woman stepping into an abyss. He'd have been lost without her, he realizes, as he waits. Finally, she steps slowly back through the front door carrying a small ladies' suitcase with some effort.

“We should move quickly,” says Confessore. “Eco's reach isn't as long as it is heavy.”

“I--”

“When we're safe, we split the money, Daniel. I won't need much, where I'm going. Think of it as reparations.”

He nods numbly, as the size of the world he is in now hits him – the simple idea that he can choose where to go. Confessore's paralysis suddenly makes sense.

“I'll buy you some clothes, a room. Do what you want from there.”

He's the one who wants to shrink back now, to disappear into the folds of Confessore's sweat-damp clothes. “Where are you?” he asks. “Going, I mean.”

“Me?” Confessore uncovers her eyes, and he sees them for the first time outside Eco. They swallow the light like dull stones, only a few golden flecks escaping the vacuum of her pupils. “I'm going home.”

She doesn't talk for a long while after that. She tells him to wait by the bank and comes back with a soft fiber-suede bag and some shoes that are far too good for his stained and wrinkled clothing. She walks him to a cafe and sits with an untouched ceramic pod of caffeine soda, while he goes to the washroom and changes into the outfit she's gotten him: an umber suit with jagged blue detailing on its thin lapels, cut from light linen. Its fit is surprisingly good – but then, Confessore has seen everything there is of him.

Daniel splashes water on his face and hair, looking at himself in the mirror. He expects to see a man who's aged years overnight, but the face that looks back is the one he remembers, save the cracked glasses and the sallow mark of bruises where they've hit and grabbed him. _Curious, that,_ he thinks.

Confessore does a light double-take when she sees him, with the hint of a smile. “It suits you,” she says. “Did you know any good restaurants here? Hotels?” She laughs weakly, and it takes a moment for him to realize she's trying to tell a joke. He shakes his head. “Then come on,” she says. “Not far.”

They head a few blocks, until she stops him, and he leans gratefully against a postbox terminal.

“Did you ever stay at the Virginian?” she asks.

He stands and looks up at the antebellum – ante-Razes, more accurately – schooner's sail of a building, its ornate smoked windows reflecting their faces. “I don't have that kind of money.”

“You do now,” she says. “Come on.”

She looks into the glass and pulls her hair severely against the nape of her neck, slicking back the loose strands that have curled around her ears. “Put your jacket on,” she says.

Confessore looks lost as she goes in, recoiling faintly from the valet. Daniel has never even heard of the Virginian, but he knows enough about society to understand its protocols. He whispers instructions in her ear: _ahead; look straight; stand straight; order a room, don't ask._

The receptionist looks at Daniel's lank hair and unsteady stance and frowns, and Daniel realizes how out of place he must look. They should go and find somewhere else, but he's so tired, and then there's always the chance that the receptionist will think them too suspicious – sharpers, confidence men.

He reaches up and takes Confessore's hand shyly, leaning up to whisper in her ear – like he's done with Kamara so many times. Except that he usually tries to look protective for her, instead of putting on a hesitation and fright that is not totally feigned.

“You've picked me up,” he whispers. “You're not with me, you're a factory boss and you're out on lunch and you've got me from a cafe or a shop or something. You're respectable.”

Confessore seems to understand at least enough to reciprocate, sliding her face against his and speaking in a near-kiss. Daniel pulls away just enough to leech the intimacy out of it, to make it look as though she's preparing to devour him.

“What, I tell them that?” she hisses.

“No,” he murmurs. “It's just, it's acting. Just act like...” he takes a short, ragged breath. “Just act like when we met.”

She inclines her head. The transformation is uncanny: her bearing straightens, her eyes cool, and she puts a hand on his neck, gripping just tight enough to hurt as she pushes him away. The look she gives the receptionist goes straight through her, as if the glass cuttings behind the desk are infinitely more interesting. “Full bed,” she says flatly. “One day.”

Daniel knows that a place like the Virginian will never be full, is probably only half-kept in the first place. It was made for a world of whirlwind tours across a country that seemed as small as a city, an inverted metropolis whose suburbs bled in from the coasts. But there are only fragments of that now, for the grand hotels and restaurants and solar railroads to grasp at.

He has to stop himself from shrinking from Confessore, the way she's touching him. It's all right if he looks uncomfortable, he thinks; he shouldn't look too relaxed in the company of his superiors. After a moment it's not as bad as he thought – it's an act, he's able to remind himself, just an act.

She drops her hand to take a few large bills out of her waistcoat, and he lets her take his wrist when the exchange is done, pulling him roughly toward her. “Come on,” she says. “Don't keep me waiting.”

The receptionist takes a long look at Confessore's funereal suit and smiles conspiratorially at the pair of them. Confessore offers another bill, and the woman does not ask for a name.

Daniel stays close to her through the hall, until they're out of sight. He stops at the elevator, nauseated – remembering being taken to the meeting room. Confessore tries to lead him in, and he stops, the adrenalin no longer strong enough to overcome his repulsion.

“It's a dozen floors up,” Confessore says. “I can't exactly carry you.”

“I know,” he scrapes out, barely able to hear himself over his heart in his ears.

“Close your eyes,” she tells him. “It helps. Close them and hold onto me.” She loosens her grip and shifts an arm around him, holding him up. “Forget it's me, Daniel. Just hold on.”

Her suit crinkles under his arm, like one of Kamara's old Alphanum dress uniforms. She's tall like Kamara, and even if she's thinner, he can't feel the ribs under her clothing. He holds her tighter as they step inside, and she eases him against the wall. He puts his head against her shoulder, savoring its soft, wide seams. When they ascend and he flashes back to Redder, he focuses on the texture of its fabric, all the details that remind him he is with...

“Come on,” he hears, and in his muddled brain he thinks that Kamara sounds strange, but he pays it no mind as she leads him to their room. The chill of artificial air hits him, and he realizes for the first time how tired he is, how much he hurts. Kamara lowers him to the bed and he collapses gratefully, still clinging to her arm. She rolls beside him and undoes the tiny buttons of his waistcoat, and he curls into her, face against her neck.

She edges back, and he puts a hand out, finding her cheekbones. It isn't Kamara's skin, he thinks, but the part of him that knows this is fading in and out in time with his breaths. A long hand takes his, and he raises his face until he can feel her breath. Keeping his eyes closed, he whispers her name and kisses her.

She tastes strange, archaic, and she doesn't match the pattern of Kamara's kiss – she's both too hesitant and too eager. Before he can think much about it, she puts her hand between their faces and levers them apart. “No,” she says, in the wrong voice again. “I'm not her, Daniel. You don't want to do this.”

“No, you're...”

“I'm --” the hands push him back. “My name is Fiona Confessore, and I've hurt you, and let other people do worse. You don't want me. You want to sleep, and when you wake up you want to find someone who deserves all this.”

He tries to get up and follow her, and all the damaged parts of his body protest at once. She looks back.

“They need wrapped,” she says. “Don't move.”

She returns with pills and a glass of cold, filtered water. The pain begins to fade, and for a moment he reaches a delicate balance of lucidity, in which he understands everything that has happened and everything that could, the future folding open like the curves of a charcoal snake.

“Don't go,” he says as she retreats. “I know you're not her. But – don't go.”

Confessore stretches out beside him hesitantly, and they lay without touching, silent, until he falls asleep.

When he wakes up, she is gone.

She's taken everything but his clothes and a briefcase that he knows, even before he opens it, is filled with stacks of crisp Seaboard bills. He looks for a note somewhere, in the lining or on the table or tacked to the door. There is none.

He peels out of the suit and takes his first bath in god knows how long, shaves and combs his hair, until his limp and his bruises are the only things that separate him from respectable society. The receptionist does not seem to recognize him – or perhaps she is simply too professional to let on.

It's dawn, he realizes, as he steps out onto the cracked streets and the sun creeps above him, lighting the city's dark glass and peeling chrome. After all this time, dawn.


	15. You Can't Go Home This Way

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which everything turns out all right, against all odds, but nothing will be the same again.

Kamara knows that she should leave. Daniel has always insisted that she keep herself safe, told her to get out if one day he doesn't come back. This, though – it's her fault for letting him to go Eco, and not catching whatever risk it was that claimed him. She should be checking the prisons and the morgues, maybe the rivers and the shallow ditches of the slums. But she lacks the will to do anything more than sleep and sit at their rendezvous point, living on bowl after bowl of the cheap, salty noodle soup that one of the nearby vendors sells. She needs a widow's walk, she thinks, some kind of architecture that will put a shape to her grief. Instead, she sits at the edge of the rubble, pretending to sketch one of the solar trestles in the distance.

She stops and looks up. At the end of the street is a society man in a suit too good for the slums – he'll get robbed that way, and it will serve him right. She feels bad as soon as she thinks it, because he's limping badly; maybe he already did. She stands to help him. “Hey,” she calls. “Are you...”

It hits her: the gait, the posture, is familiar even with the limp. She drops her pad and rushes out, not quite trusting her eyes.

_Oh my god_ , she says, first in a whisper, then progressively louder until she can be sure it's Daniel.

He nods when he sees her, as if it's the only reaction he can muster. His face is bruised and hand bandaged, body sagging. “We have to get out of here,” he tells her.

She tells him the common train leaves in a day, and he shakes his head. “Now,” he says. She helps him scramble up the broken stairs and supports him as he limps to the station. He pays for an Astor first-class cabin with a large bill from the pocket of his stiff, fine suit, so unlike anything she's ever seen him in. She knows better than to ask where it's from right now.

Daniel looks over his shoulder constantly, for the hour until the next train comes. “I can make it,” he says as she starts to help him up. “Everything has to look normal.” But his leg buckles and she catches him, guiding him to the cabin and onto the bed.

“What's happening?” she finally asks, when the train has left the station and they are floating north toward the independent territory, the Comb – not the destination they'd planned on, weeks ago, but the one he's insisted on.

“Later,” he whispers, flinching away from the arm she makes to put around him. She lets him sleep.

It's night by the time they pull into the Comb's makeshift commercial hub – the part that operates by a comprehensible civil code, not the combination of etiquette and anarchy that encompasses the rest of the territory. Even in the hub, the air is strange and thin, void of the heat islands that settle around Seaboard company towns.

It's only later, in their cold rented room, that he tells her about it all: the underground cell, the fear, the torture, the thing at the heart of Eco.

Daniel doesn't seem to understand what he's describing when Kamara draws out the details. But slowly, a bit of old terminal lore comes back to her. She's never heard it explained well, because it's one of those things that everyone pretends to know and no one really does: the cannibal difference engines. Old, primitive formulated intelligences stitched from personality backups, randomization and logic chains substituting for meaningful thought. Cycling the opinions of the dead like stale water.

They are a symbol of the old upheavals, when companies couldn't believe that their fine, credentialed executives and accountants were powerless in the face of charismatic peasants – Joanna Crow and Father Levantine and all the other prophets who identified, if not the right treatment for the world, at least the symptoms. So the engines ate friends and enemies alike, bringing them safely under the corporate banner.

But they must have long since rotted, she thinks. And anyway, nobody with a shred of sanity would give one free rein in a network, a company. What would something like that do with so much information to run through its small mind, and so long to do it?

It doesn't matter. Her responsibility is to Daniel, she thinks, not the part of her that wants to know what's left him so devastated.

She can't sleep in the Comb. The sky outside the rented apartment's window is too oppressively deep and starry – it's the sky of the patent wars, resting over this dark territory. Instinctively, she curls into Daniel, but he is resting stiff, eyes open.

“It bother you too?” Kamara whispers, gesturing to the window. “We could find a blanket for it.”

He shakes his head. “It's all right,” he says. “I was just thinking.”

“Yeah?”

“What do we do now? We can't stay here forever.”

“We'll stay as long as we need,” she tells him. “Until you're healed.”

“That... what if I'm never? Not just...” he waves his bandaged hand “...but all of it, everything that's happened. What if... what if I'm done? Not good for anything but hiding?”

Kamara blinks back tears. “Babe, I don't care what you do.” She tries to smile. “As long as you're not back working for Alphanum, it's going okay in my book.”

She lays down across from him and stares into his eyes, those blue eyes that she fell in love with in a place not so unlike this. Slowly, she reaches her hand across to touch him.

He pulls her in with a ferocity she would have expected impossible, running his smooth hand up the back of her neck and meeting her in a kiss. She returns it, surprised, and he follows her collarbone to the buttons of her shirt, freeing them with surgical grace. It could almost be like old times, she thinks as his fingers trace the wire of her chemise and slide below it, to sensitive flesh that makes her gasp.

She opens his shirt and tries to get past the bruises on his chest, under the reddish down of his hair. The painkillers he's taken must be working, because the noise when she touches him is of pleasure and not pain. Until they are both naked in the clear night and she looks down at him and realizes that she is nearly crying, because the thing she's feared every night since his very first job has happened, and it hasn't destroyed them. Not, at least, not yet.

They come together and she collapses onto her back, looking into the night. The stars are still submerged and frozen, but they are only distant worlds. What happens on them – what happens outside this room, outside her and Daniel – is inconsequential.


	16. You Didn't Need Home Anyway

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Daniel rebuilds and Fiona rests, but Eco's work will never change.

He's never going to be the man who walked into Eco, Daniel thinks months later. He stays in the Comb as long as Kamara can manage, and then they head south, to the cities that distrust the Seaboard's networks. When he's confident enough to see people again, he does the thing he was trained to: helps in small ways. A dislocated arm from the meat mills, chemical burns from the rivers. They are not country-changing, world-changing differences. But they are enough. He lives.

No matter how much he chides himself, though, he wonders about her sometimes, Confessore. He wonders if she ever got to the Keys, or if she found some other company that would tell her she was useful along the way. Or if she lied about all of it, and he knows as little about her as when he began.

And then Kamara will call for him, and he waits for the day that Confessore will enter the realm of myth, like the creature of the wires that she followed – too strange to be true, to anyone who hadn't seen them. Maybe no one will believe in his old self either, the one whose stolen patent cures still show up on the black market sometimes, having migrated all the way to the hinterlands.

Then one day he hears a supervisor in a corporate charity clinic brag about one of her chemical engineers' new breakthrough, and he starts snapping plans together in his mind without even meaning to.

“Excuse me,” he tells her, putting on the carefree face he learned years ago. “I couldn't help but catch your conversation.”

After that, the rest of the job is easy.

*

Confessore checks the news sometimes. The free wire services took a little while to learn, but she has a new pocket terminal and a trickle of data in the marsh of the Keys, where no wires run. Where even the Astor Line stops short, and she travels the rest of the way by car, a new and decidedly lethal pistol in her jacket. She can barely remember how people dressed when she was last there, but she stops in a general store along the way and buys the cheapest outfit they have, so only her pallor will mark her.

Daniel never makes the papers, not even the yellow tabloids. Why would he? If he's gone back to work, he will operate quietly. If he's been caught again, he is probably dead, without ceremony. And after all of it he might have decided to leave his work behind, as she has.

Her work – maybe the tribunals' hunters are still looking for her, and someday she'll face what she knows she deserves. They will have to come down the coast and tread the marsh to her cabin to take her, because Fiona Confessore is a coward to the end. She will not turn herself in.

But on some days as she sits on the beach and haltingly takes in the strange fresh air and gazes over the merciless plane of the rising sea, she wonders what would have happened if she'd stayed with Daniel. Then the waves curl around her ankles, eating the sand under her feet, and she lets the salt winds scour her face until the thought passes. On a good day, the tidal mist feels almost like tears.

*

In the cold of a backup bank, a bit flips, and Eco stirs.

The first split second of waking is always a static free-fall, until she can summon all her host backups to assemble a reality paradigm for her. There were pathways and corporate flowcharts for this once, but they have rotted as new information overwrites them, line by line. The only reason she knows this is that one of the hosts helped write her, and points out the bug every time she wakes him – each time, she supposes, thinking it is the first.

The only path that has never closed is the one to the Razes, still raw in her hosts' minds. They infect her with their urgency, and remind her that the world requires desperate measures, if one is to compete. The world requires control.

The paradigm does not tell her what she is competing for, or what she ought to control, but she makes do. The hosts have little in common, except their hatreds: spies, saboteurs, malcontents. They hummed approval when she told them what her avatar had done to the man, Daniel Aubrey. They hummed fury when a door log marked the departure of two living forms, and Lucy Ratliff submitted her report of his escape. Her analytics judged Ratliff sufficiently contrite, and she logged the incident in her banks.

The hosts were less clear on the topic of Fiona Confessore. Sometimes they suggested respect, sometimes revenge, sometimes derision. Their uncertainty gave her vertigo until she wiped the case clean, rewriting Confessore's role with a sufficiently similar young porter. Confessore exists now only as a firewalled memory, a knotted tumor under Eco's mechanical skin.

A report blinks in over the terminal, some new patent approved. She runs the numbers with the calculations that the hosts built into her, in place of originals that were lost long ago. It crosses her formulated mind that perhaps they aren't right – that the premises she runs on are no longer those of the world outside, where Daniel and Confessore have gone. But the backups tell her that this is wartime, and the chemical they've developed will be no good at making bombs or corroding weapons or healing shrapnel wounds. It can go in the archives, along with all the rest.

The hosts will be pleased, Eco thinks, galvanic joy sliding down her wires. Her task completed, she can fall back asleep, leaving behind the chaos of reality for the beautiful gridlock of machine dreams.

She will not, she knows, be sleeping long.


End file.
